Human Events

Obama Administration To Terrorist’s Family: Sorry For Blowing Up Your Son

When Predator drones caught up with terrorist guru Anwar al-Awlaki last week, he did not journey into oblivion alone.Killed with him was Samir Khan, 25, the editor of al-Qaeda’s magazine.

Khan, like Awlaki, was an American citizen, born of Saudi parents but raised in New York.ABC News offered a career retrospective of Awlaki’s young protégé:

Khan had become a rising figure in jihadist propaganda and an “aspiring” Awlaki, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

But while Awlaki relied on sermons to recruit jihadis, Khan used sarcasm and idiomatic English in an attempt to appeal to Western youth. As Khan himself has said, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I [am] Al Qaeda to the core.” He titled a rebuke of toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak “A Cold Diss.” Khan’s ability to use American vernacular, like a graphic depicting graffiti that reads, “Jihad 4 Eva,” had prompted concerns that young Muslims with an interest in jihad and al Qaeda would be drawn to a voice similar to their own.

“He does appear to be increasingly involved with operational activities [of Al Qaeda]”, a U.S. official told ABC News in 2010.

(Emphasis mine.)Khan’s magazine, Inspire, was popular with the jihadi in-crowd.Copies were found in the apartments of the would-be U.K. bombers.The guy who wanted to blow up the Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland last year was a contributor to Khan’s online publications.You can see why the mass-murder crowd looked forward to every issue:

Khan had edited seven separate issues of “Inspire” since launching the publication in 2010, penning such articles as “How To Build A Bomb In the Kitchen of Your Mom.” Inspire carried sermons by Awlaki and other jihadi figures, boasted about the failed “printer bomb” cargo plane plot, and paid tribute to Osama bin Laden before and after his death.

It outlined various techniques for jihadis to attack Americans within U.S. borders, including using pick-up trucks to mow down pedestrians, how to blow up buildings with natural gas, and how to use an AK-47 automatic rifle. The magazines grew in graphic sophistication with each issue, and Khan seemed to write, edit or design the majority of the content.

Khan was a blogger, working out of his parents’ house in North Carolina, before he got into the magazine business.The New York Timesprofiled him in 2007, offering an overview of his web work:

In recent days, he has featured “glad tidings” from a North African militant leader whose group killed 31 Algerian troops. He posted a scholarly treatise arguing for violent jihad, translated into English. He listed hundreds of links to secret sites from which his readers could obtain the latest blood-drenched insurgent videos from Iraq.

His neatly organized site also includes a file called “United States of Losers,” which showcased a recent news broadcast about a firefight in Afghanistan with this added commentary from Mr. Khan: “You can even see an American soldier hiding during the ambush like a baby!! AllahuAkbar! AllahuAkbar!”

The Times was lucky enough to score an interview with this fine young man:

He described his favorite video from Iraq: a fiery suicide-bomber attack on an American outpost.

“It was something that brought great happiness to me,” he said. “Because this is something America would never want to admit, that they are being crushed.”

Asked how he felt living among people who had sent soldiers to Iraq, Mr. Khan said: “Whatever happens to their sons and daughters is none of my concern. They are people of hellfire and I have no concern for them.”

Ironically, the American military would go on to crush the ever-loving hell out of Samir Khan and his slimy mentor, not long after they gunned down “Shaykh Bin Laden” like a dog.

And now the Obama Administration is apologizing to Khan’s parents for his death.

An official from the U.S. State Department has called the Charlotte family of al-Qaida propagandist Samir Khan to offer the government’s condolences on his death in a U.S. drone attack last week in Yemen, according to a family spokesman.

“They were very apologetic (for not calling the family sooner) and offered condolences,” Jibril Hough said about the Thursday call from the State Department to Khan’s father, Zafar.

The phone call came a day after the family released a statement through Hough that condemned the “assassination” of their 25-year-old son – a U.S. citizen – and said they were “appalled” that they had not heard from the U.S. government to discuss their son’s remains or answer questions about why Khan was not afforded due process.

How did the call go?According to family spokesman Jibril Hough, it was “kind of positive and optimistic.”He thinks the family’s angry statement “appears to have gotten [the Administration’s] attention.”

Samir Khan was a willing accomplice to mass murder, and a declared enemy of both America and civilization itself.One of the articles he wrote for Inspire was entitled, “I Am Proud to Be a Traitor to America.”There is nothing ambiguous about his status.His shredded corpse is not sliding down a slippery slope that ends with some future American president calling in Predator drone strikes on newspaper editors who displease him.Loyalty logically implies the possibility of treason.There has to be some threshold beyond which a declared traitor is taken seriously, or else there is literally no way to fight the terrorist enemy we face, and al-Qaeda will secure victory through its very mockery of the laws of war.

Obama’s people are clearly nervous that his airheaded campaign rhetoric will be turned against him, and the hard Left will suddenly rediscover the “principles” that led them to excoriate his predecessor.This has led the Administration to a disgraceful act of confusion and weakness.Now that this deranged “apology” to a terrorist’s family is a matter of record, it’s only fair for the rest of America to expect the family’s apology to us.They can start by explaining why they were happy to let little Sammy run a clearinghouse for jihad snuff films out of their basement.

John Hayward began his blogging career as a guest writer at Hot Air under the pen name "Doctor Zero," producing a collection of essays entitled Doctor Zero: Year One.
He is a great admirer of free-market thinkers such as Arthur Laffer, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell. He writes both political and cultural commentary, including book and movie reviews. An avid fan of horror and fantasy fiction, he has produced an e-book collection of short horror stories entitled Persistent Dread.
John is a former staff writer for Human Events. He is a regular guest on the Rusty Humphries radio show, and has appeared on numerous other local and national radio programs, including G. Gordon Liddy, BattleLine, and Dennis Miller.